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Google’s Emma Haruka Iwao and her team have broken the Guinness World Record for calculating the most accurate value of pi. Little surprise that this accomplishment was announced on Pi Day. The team harnessed the power of cloud computing to successfully run calculations for 31,415,926,535,897 digits of pi.
Iwao works as a cloud developer advocate at Google. She and her team have broken the previous record of 22,459,157,718,361 digits which was set back in 2016. The same y-cruncher program was used to calculate pi as the previous record holder. However, the edge was provided by Google’s cloud-based compute engine. To calculate the 31 trillion digits of pi, it took 25 virtual machines and 121 days to run the calculation. The previous record holder, Peter Trueb, used one very fast computer with two dozen 6TB hard drives to store the massive dataset produced. That calculation was completed in 105 days.Iwao did mention that one of the biggest challenges with this project was the need for “